I find myself wondering tonight how many times in my life I have thought about what it means to be strong… and I'm thinking right now, that where you find it has a lot to do with who you're being strong for.
When I was very little, strength had a lot to do with letting go. I cried on my first day of pre-school when I had to let go of my mother's leg. I cried when the school year ended and I realized I would never be a Kindergartener, or a First-Grader, or a Second Grader ever again. I cried when I turned 10 and I would never have a one-digit age again. I was a sensitive kid.
I didn't cry when my mom took us away from my dad, and we moved half way across the country with our toothbrushes, our birth certificates and the clothes on our backs. I did cry when I finally realized, three weeks later, that we were never going back home to our family in Northern California.
When you're little, you don't think much about being strong… you only know that things are changing, and that it's hard. I cried so much when I was little. I think I might have cried every day, about every thing.
But as I got older, I started to understand what my mother had gone through, and how she had gone through it all in order to give us a better life. I started to realize how much it hurt her to take us away from everything we knew, and particularly how much it hurt her to see us suffer. So I tried my best, to stop crying so much.
I guess, this is where love and strength intersect. Humans do a lot of terrible things to each other, every day. But the times we do things out of love, we might realize we are also capable of doing things beyond reason… noble things. We are capable of so much, because of love.
When I got a bit older, strength was that which is firm, and unmovable. I thought about fortitude, and endurance.. I thought about stubborn determination and about things that would not break, no matter what. It kind of made sense.
But the thing I guess I forgot to factor in was 'time'…
… because with time, the rocks wear down with winds and water… fortresses fall and are forgotten… stubborn determination can bring senseless suffering… and you realize, that like a cancer, that sometimes you have to destroy the parts of yourself that are destroying you.
Then I thought strength is something else, it's something that is dynamic, and manipulates the tides of time like a sailboat uses the wind, that strength is dynamic and graceful, and navigates the seas of possibility. It's something you find in yourself that moves you through this world, you just have to find the right cross-wind.
But sometimes you wait, and the wind just never comes. Sometimes, you stand dead in the water. Sometimes, a storm will come and destroy your sail and it just happened, and there's nothing in the world you could have done to stop it.
Where do you find strength then, under such hopeless and helpless circumstances? What is it that motivates you to keep breathing, when all hope is lost and you realize, that no amount of resilience will keep the forces of nature from breaking you, and that even with all the grace in the world, the winds won't take you to where you need to go?
I've found myself here floundering, and feeling like I'd completely failed in every sense of the word. I will tell you it hurt. I will tell you it pained me so deeply that I just wished it would stop… I just wished everything, everything would stop.
And now looking back, it's easier to see, that though I had broken, I was still there… that although the elements had rendered me incapacitated, that I still breathed in and out. If there is anything I have realized in my 26 stubborn years of risk-taking and my 26 years of thinking I could dodge any obstacle life threw at me, it's that life is turbulent and unpredictable… that sometimes obstacles are unavoidable… but also that even when things are most certainly NOT okay… they are, anyway.
I can't speak for those who have decided life is not worth living, because although stubbornness has broken me, this is just something I'm holding onto. Because I'm me, and I have decided that life is worth living, and worth being broken- over and over and over again. To me, it's just worth it.
This is some kind of other strength. This is some kind of strength when strength is absent, which doesn't make sense but hear me out- I have decided, for better or worse, that my life in all its suffering, and all its pain is worth living- and this is my choice to make.
And if you asked me why, what treasure is worth every inevitable misfortune and heartbreak- I will tell you it's because of love.
I have been broken, and I'm sure I will break again. Something I've realized these past few years, is that a life of self-preservation is sort of missing the point. If it weren't for all the loss and destruction, big and small, it would have been impossible for me to understand the shape of these things as they have left absent impressions in my heart.
I promise you, time will leave you vulnerable… and although it might seem strange, it's really been my lack of strength which has taught me the most about where strength comes from… I am given an opportunity to experience the strength of those who love me. They lay the foundation of me with their wisdom, they scaffold the walls of my soul with their determination and they give me the support to rebuild who I am… into something new, something better and someone who is, again and again, a product of pure love.
It's easy to see how a life of perpetual building and destruction can seem like a futile effort.. but that's like looking at a two-dimensional black and white snapshot of the universe… at a very low resolution. It seems pointless because if you look at it through only one kind of lens, at one moment in time, it IS pointless.
But now as I've been broken some one billion times or more, the fabric of my beliefs, the building of who I am and what I think and what's the truth seems more and more irrelevant. Who I am today, could be gone tomorrow. It most absolutely will be. Sometimes the people that love me, the engineers of my soul, no longer love me enough to help me rebuild and I can't really blame them, because they're probably not who they once were, either. So if who I become is unpredictable as who will play a part in my 'coming to being', then what have I got to hold on to? What's the point?
What's worse, what if nobody loves you?
The thing is, just like how sometimes life isn't fair and just like how pain and suffering is inevitable, I will guarantee you you'll never be sure if anyone loves you as much as you love them… and even if they do, that will most likely change, or if you're optimistic- fluctuate- over time.
But this really shouldn't bum you out, because if it does you're not fully understanding exactly what love is… particularly, that if you really love someone, it doesn't matter if they love you back. You do it anyway. (This also applies to self-love.) It's indestructible and untouchable… it's the ONLY thing that is… because it's unconditional (and by all definitions illogical and stupid). Even if nobody loves you… it's up to you whether or not to donate your love to this world, to whoever, whenever, whatever, regardless if it's being taken or appreciated or reciprocated. It's love for the sake of love, and when you're on the receiving end of it, its serendipity, it's a blessing and you never had it coming. Its like that gust of wind in your sail… it just happened. Lucky you.
No one deserves love, but if you have it, consider yourself blessed and be grateful. And remember who you were, and how you came to be and take joy in giving love… just for the sake of giving it.
I'm kind of realizing the more I learn in my life, the stupider it sounds when I'm writing about it… but I know every day I'm alive is better because of the things I understand but can't describe very well. I am kinder today than I was yesterday. I have more love in my heart for you, who I may or may not know, than I ever thought possible.
